


the color of boom

by sibley (ferns)



Category: The Flash (TV 1990), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: (thats for james and zoey the girls are healthy), Families of Choice, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Mental Health Issues, Multi, Polyamory, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-18
Updated: 2018-01-18
Packaged: 2019-03-06 09:54:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13408764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ferns/pseuds/sibley
Summary: Axel learns how to build homemade explosives at age five.





	the color of boom

**Author's Note:**

> While it's not graphic and detail isn't really gone into, there's still some discussion of abuse in here.
> 
> Welcome to the only fic where Axel Walker has three moms. He may be a giant dick but he loves them.

Axel learns how to make explosions when he is five.

His parents are out, leaving him with his “Auntie” Tina, as he calls her, even though he’s not so young he can’t tell that she’s just as much his mother as his mommy is. He sits on her lap while she reads to him out loud from the papers on her desk, telling him about how _these_ chemicals can be mixed with _these_ chemicals to cause _this_ reaction. He’s sleepy and just starting to drift off in her lap when she bounces him awake and says “Do you want to test some of these out?”

Axel looks up at her, wide-eyed. She grins and he beams back. “Really?”

“I know how to make homemade fireworks,” Auntie Tina tells him, and he jumps off of her lap and onto the floor and runs in a quick excited circle before coming back to her side. “Your parents don’t like it when I make them, but…” She winks. “You know, what they don’t know won’t hurt them.”

People like to say that Axel’s parents are the wild ones. That Auntie Tina’s the one who keeps them in line. Axel thinks that’s silly. Sure, his mommies are a little… Excitable, or at least that’s what Uncle Julio says, but they’re not like Tina is, because Tina has lots of money and lots of fancy gadgets and all his Mom has is her gun and all his Mommy has are her toys.

Auntie Tina isn’t ruthless like they are-another word he learned from Uncle Julio-but she is smart, and resourceful, and very, very good at driving terribly while keeping everyone inside the car alive. Axel loves her for it. Just like his mommies love her for it.

Auntie Tina shows him how to set up the homemade fireworks, telling him to stand back and wear goggles so he doesn’t get hurt. He obeys eagerly, clinging to her legs and watching the tiny explosions in the parking lot of Mercury Labs. It’s still a small building, and Axel doesn’t know what Auntie Tina does there, but all the employees like him and they let him run around as much as he wants to.

Axel and Auntie Tina make it a habit of blowing things up when Axel needs to let off steam after that, or when Auntie Tina needs to vent and the only one around is a child who she won’t burden with being her personal therapist. He sits on her shoulders or stands next to her and watches the fireworks light up and then dutifully recites all the key components that went into making them.

She praises him and laughs and says that he should always be careful around explosions and other science experiments, but that doesn’t mean that he shouldn't do them at all. As long as he’s responsible and takes care of himself and remembers to be safe when it comes to homemade fireworks, she’ll support him in his excursions.

At the time, he just beams and nods and thinks about how _wonderful_ Independence Day will be this year, when he and his three mommies build their own fireworks and watch them light up the sky, bigger than the tiny ones that snap and crackle in the parking lot and are flashy but quick to burn out.

Years later, he incorporates those fireworks into his bombs, and writes a thank you note to his third mother that he never sends and instead burns.

* * *

Axel learns how to fire a gun when he is twelve.

His mom takes him to the firing range and shows him how to shoot, guiding him through it gently and with a kind of surety that comes from years of practice. She shows him how to be safe about it, how to hold a gun properly so nobody will get hurt.

She tells him that this is only for when he’s an adult, and even then he shouldn’t buy a gun. Just because he knows how to use something, that doesn’t mean he needs to actually own it. He has to be safe. He has to be _responsible._

Axel asks why _she_ gets to have a gun even though he’s not supposed to have one when he’s grown up. She ruffles his hair, which he’s recently bleached for the very first time with her help, and tells him that it’s because her job is dangerous. Exhilarating and sometimes totally worth it, but extremely dangerous. Private Investigators don’t usually have very long lifespans, and the only reason she’s been around for this long is because she knows how to take care of herself and how to take care of the people she loves.

Axel thinks just a little bit bitterly about how his mom never lets him stay outside too late even though he’s old enough to handle himself, doesn’t like it when he tells people that he has three moms or even just two (at least this is a fear that he can understand), doesn’t like it when he climbs on the roof, doesn’t like it when he does _anything_ without her or Tina’s say-so. Maybe she’s _too_ good at protecting the people she loves.

The anger doesn’t stay for long. It never does. His mom is the only one who he can go to about his problems. His mommy has enough issues, _way_ more than enough issues, enough that he doesn’t even think to go to her with his problems anymore, and his-his-his _whatever_ Tina is to him tries to convince him to be rational whenever he can and is so busy with work that she doesn’t always have time for him even though she wants to.

His mom is the one who is always there for him, the person he gets his explosive personality from, according to his mommy. When he was a baby they were inseparable, and there are a hundred photos of him playing with his mom all titled things like “Megan took Axel to the beach without the rest of us!” because that’s just how his mom _is._ His mommy likes to say that it’s because, after her, Megan was the second person Axel saw after he was born.

On the drive back from the gun range, Axel sticks his head out the window and screams along to whatever song is playing on the radio while his mom sings along loudly and off-key beside him.

Years later, he passes a gun store, and pauses outside the window. He remembers his mom guiding him and keeping him safe and telling him to never, ever buy a gun of his own. He thinks about the Flash and, for once, he listens to her advice.

* * *

Axel learns how to tell his mama (he hasn’t called her ‘mommy’ in a long time) he loves her when he is twenty-six.

For a long time, he’s not sure how to. Maybe that’s why he starts up correspondence with James Jesse at age fifteen. Trying to replace the absence of his mama. Not the physical absence-she’s always been there, a comforting rock like Aunt Tina is instead of a whirlwind of emotions that travels the world like his other mom does. But she’s… Spacey, or at least that’s what Julio calls her. Other people have been crueler about it. Told Axel that his mama isn’t right in the head, that drugs or alcohol or  _something_ fucked her up beyond repair.

If there’s one thing that Axel has _never,_ ever believed about his mama, it’s that. Well, that and the people who say that she doesn’t love him because she’s so odd. He _knows_ those people are wrong. But that doesn’t mean telling his mama he loves her is any easier. Especially now that he’s older and can recognize what she’s going through-because he’s going through it himself. Schizophrenia has a genetic component, after all, and Axel knew immediately where he must’ve gotten it from.

The cocktail of antipsychotics he’s on-and lately has been thinking about quitting-keep him from spiralling, but he can’t really say the same for his mama and the medication she takes. She loves him in her own way just like he loves her in his own way, but saying it is hard for him. It always _has_ been hard for him.

It’s so, so easy to say it to James Jesse. So, so easy to love James Jesse even before he finds out that they’re related. He looks up to him as a criminal, as the man who almost brought Central City down to its knees _(twice!)._ The timeline fits for Jesse to be his father, which he looks up much later, but his mama was never tried. Nobody could figure out if she was another one of Jesse’s hypnotized victims or not, his father tells him through laughter a few hours after they’ve met for the first time in person.

A week later Axel realizes that he’s made a mistake trusting Jesse. By then, it’s too late. His parents are furious at him, he’s being tried for crimes he didn’t commit alongside the ones that he did, and he doesn’t know how on Earth he’s going to get out of this. Jesse seems too crazy to care. Maybe that’s insensitive. Axel doesn’t give a shit if it is, not after what his father has done.

After he breaks out of prison, a remarkably easy feat when you have someone on the inside to help you do so, Axel goes back home. He knows it’ll be the first place the police look or him. He knows Megan technically kind of works in law enforcement. He knows Tina is semi-friends with the Flash, the very superhero that locked him away. But he has to go home.

His mom is sitting at the dining room table building something. She looks up at him and beams. “Axey!” She throws her arms around him and it makes him stumble a little. “I missed you so much! And I'm so, so proud of you!”

She doesn’t bother to question how he got out of prison. Out of all of his parents, she and Megan are the ones who most understand criminality, and out of her and Megan, she is the one who is most likely to condone it. There are crimes she won’t commit, but Axel knows she’s done others. Megan taught him how to fire a gun and pick locks and scale fences, Tina taught him how to make homemade explosives and sew his own costumes and drive, but his mama taught him how to _steal._

“I know who my father is,” Axel says. “I know what he did to you.” _And to my other mom._

Her smile doesn’t falter. “He loved me once, you know. Just like he loves you know.” At Axel’s shocked and confused and disgusted expression, she explains. “As a partner in crime.” She cradles his chin in her hands. “Oh, you’re such a wonderful heir to the Trickster throne. Don’t you know that?”

“I’d rather be the heir to _your_ throne,” he mutters. “I love you, Mom.”

She squeezes his hand. There are scars on her body from his father that his other mothers have been working to help her heal for years. He understands that now.

Axel knows how to pick locks and shoot a gun and shoplift and hack a webcam and cover a security camera without it catching you on tape and take pictures of someone in high quality from over a block away and how to make homemade fireworks and bombs and toys and candy and costumes and how to do perfect eyeliner and how to do do a backflip on a trampoline. He knows how to be a criminal and he loves it.  _Loves_ tricking the system like that.

Now he knows he doesn’t get it from his dad. That he never did. Maybe he should change his name to match.

And oh, what the hell, he kinda likes the sound of  _Prank._

**Author's Note:**

> They're bringing Zoey back (heart eyes) so here is your reminder that James Jesse pushed her out of a moving vehicle and used and abused her for personal gain.


End file.
